A major part of my fascination with the Turkish city of Istanbul is its possession, historically, of three names. It has, at various points in the past, been also called Byzantium and Constantinople; and all three names mark different epochs in the city’s history. To really get a sense of the age, the rich history and the culture of this area, you’d have to invent a way to say those three words at the same time: “ByConIzantantiumoplebul”, perhaps.
Alternatively, one could hyphenate; “Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul”. Neither of these is practical, and I suppose just calling the place Istanbul is the most sensible option (the band — The Four Lads had a song titled Istanbul, not Constantinople). It seems unfair to the city’s history. Names are important, and when cities change theirs, a part of that history is lost.
The importance of names is often the reason cities’ names are changed in the first place. So, St Petersburg in Russia, named after the apostle Saint Peter, was renamed Petrograd in 1914 (apparently the original name sounded too German). A decade later, the city was named Leningrad, after the death of Lenin. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the people voted to restore the original name. That they thought this was important enough to vote on is proof enough that they believed names matter.
In India, of course, a number of our cities are strongly linked to the British Raj; some of them even owing their existences to the British Empire. And I can see why people should turn to names to try to rid themselves of those influences — perhaps I’m being far too generous to those who insist on name changes, but I’d like to believe that they’re trying to commit honest acts of re-appropriation, doing what they can to make their cities their own.
Except, of course, that to do so is to deny history. The British Raj did happen. Huge portions of it were, and continue to be, very unpleasant. If not for the Raj, I would not be inflicting this (English language) column upon you, and that alone ought to be reason enough. But it happened, and to pretend otherwise would be to delude ourselves.
Bombay and Mumbai, Madras and Chennai — these may refer to the same geographical spaces, but they signify very different ideas. And sometimes having both words and both meanings can be extremely useful. So I stubbornly continue to refer to Bombay, Madras and Calcutta as often as I can, to
remind people of what these cities have been, and what they have meant. In doing so, I risk being ‘unpatriotic’, an Anglophile, and apparently, having any movies I may make in the future condemned by Raj Thackeray.
And sometimes I forget, and accidentally refer to ‘Mumbai’ or ‘Chennai’ — these new names have become common enough that forgetting is easier than it was. The new names are winning, and it’s possible that one day calling Mumbai Bombay will sound as weird as a tourist in Turkey wishing to go to Byzantium. But it’s a pity.
— The writer is a student of English literature and a compulsive book buyer. She blogs at http://bluelullaby.blogspot.com
bluelullaby@gmail.com
